We seem to be on a Neil Simon kick here lately. Jeff Abraham sent me this link to another article about Mr. Simon, which comes complete with the usual mistake of claiming that Woody Allen wrote for Your Show of Shows.
The article is mainly about shock that the recent Broadway revival of Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs was a fast failure. I don't think it's that huge a shock. Only three years earlier, a revival of one of his biggest hits, Barefoot in the Park, barely lasted a hundred performances and the Christina Applegate resurrection of Sweet Charity didn't do all that much better. His last original play, 45 Seconds From Broadway, closed after 73 performances and his last new musical, The Goodbye Girl, was also not a success despite the marquee value of Martin Short and Bernadette Peters. There have been some hits — the most recent Odd Couple revival lasted as long as Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick were willing to do it; a revival of The Sunshine Boys ran as long as Jack Klugman and Tony Randall wanted it to run — but it's been a while since the odds favored anything with Neil Simon's name on it. His last real hit was Lost in Yonkers and that was 17 years ago.
I'm a big fan of Simon's best work, and I even find his (relative) failures interesting. I'm just not surprised that audiences are not automatically flocking to anything he writes these days, at least on and around Broadway.
One other interesting point in that article: Mr. Simon says something about his old colleague Mel Brooks that suggests some hostility — something about wanting to kill him. In Simon's autobiography, he makes almost no mention of his days on Your Show of Shows, which you'd think would have yielded several anecdote-rich chapters. It struck me as quite odd. How many writers pen their memoirs and skip over their first major success?
I have a suspicion. It's that Simon has either written or is planning to write a separate book about those years but doesn't want it published until certain people — not necessarily including Mel — pass away. Wonder if I'm right…